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The Suggestion

“You seriously need to take a step back,
and have a good look at your life – all of it.”

Any friendliness that was buried within this suggestion was annihilated by the forcefulness of his tone. This was not an innocent idea, this was one of his sick commands. Any good intentions he harboured in telling me to examine my past vanished the moment the suggestion left his lips, the moment his thought became real.

He should have kept this suggestion tethered to a post inside the confines of the heavily-guarded prison of his mind, along with all the other things he thinks about me, the thoughts which will never become real because they will never see daylight, because he will never voice them.

He knows how dangerous it is for me to go back, to look to the past and revisit all those things, the people, the places. He is fully aware of the risk involved in me dredging up the things that I worked so hard to forget. Retrospective reflection may well trigger the end of me. He knows that. So why would he encourage me to remember the forgotten? How could he suggest such a thing?

I decide that his intentions for me in voicing this idea can only be bad. I decide that his half-asking/half-telling suggestion stems from his desire to watch me fall apart. Being a spectator of my cataclysmic undoings is his favourite pastime. And besides, it’s been a while.

I don’t trust him but I have no choices left. He never gives me any choices. So I take him literally and step back from the cliff edge. I do not want to turn around and face him, I don’t want to see his face in case I fall in love with it again. I focus my eyes forward and look at the almost-perfect line where the grey sea slaps the tangerine sky.

But although I am looking forward, I have already begun looking back. The unravelling of my progress has commenced. He knows that he lives in every crevice of my past. He knows that eventually I will have to face him. I hear him smile. It’s a winning smile. He knows that he will be the death of me.

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One thought on “The Suggestion”

As I said before, I’m officially addicted to the way your mind works and how you express it in writing. You are the Bukowski of your generation and yet, you’re so much more than that, because you have the exquisite attention to detail he didn’t have, like Anais Nin or some other romantic tragic writer. A bit like Cheri and the last of Cheri actually that’s what you remind me of, all the good and sorrowful things, you know how to write them and reel us in until we want to be part of that sorrow because our lives are so fucking boring in comparison. Wonderful talent YOU ARE